Archive for the ‘monocle’ Category

I have recently been commissioned to build quite a few single page websites. My clients believe that a single page selling them or their only product is all that is required.

I am from the school of thought where a website should have lots of pages to attract search engines. I have a number of sites where this works well, however other sites only 1 or 2 pages rank well in the likes of Google or Yahoo.

Recently I have been wondering if a well written single page website can fight against its content rich competitors. My findings were quite interesting. The first site I tried it on was a site offering a Drain unblocking service –www.mmdrainsunblocked.co.uk.

Basically this site offers plumbing services across the south-east of england. However a site like this needs to make a fast impact. If someone has a blocked drain or a leaking pipe, do they need to trawl through several pages to find out which number they need to call, or if the service they require is available? Saying all of this I was a bit sceptical about the single webpage approach, but the customer gets what the customer wants.

So I set about creating the webpage. I got in touch with my designer who did a fantastic job of making the site look professional. My thinking was that we needed to say a lot in an instant to make an impact. His design was bright and simple. Now it was over to me. I then built a content management system allowing the user to modify each section of the new page. Again if google and the user only have one page to view then content is king, so it would need to be updated regularly. We made sure that the key towns were listed with their telephone numbers at the bottom of the page.

Quite quickly we found that the single page approach was successful. Within 3 weeks the new website was on the first page of google for quite a few search terms. We still agree there is a long drawn out battle still to be won with this website; as you can imagine there is a lot of competition in this sector. We will have to review the number of jobs that come in via this approach but the initial findings are promising.

The next single webpage site was developed to help my dad. My dad sells monocles online using eBay. He decided he wanted a website so sell his monocles, but there was a challenge. How can you describe a monocle and make it sound interesting? I went over and over his eBay advert and just could not find a way to make a monocle sales pitch. I toyed with the idea of having a history of monocle page, but again I could not come up with a reasonable explanation as to why this website needed one. After all if you arrive on his site you know what a monocle is anyway.

So this weekend we launched another single page website selling gold monocles. The website allows you to buy a prescription monocle and checkout with either PayPal or Google Checkout. The website www.themonocleshop.com has only been around a few days so it’s too early to tell if it is a success. If it works as well as his eBay page then I am sure it will be!

Have you ever created a single page website or are contemplating it? Who knows maybe single page well written websites are the future.